Shelly VanEpps discusses maintaining healthy collections: Aim for 98% collection of production, manage insurance claims & accurate estimates.
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About Shelly VanEpps
Shelly is the VP of Business Development & a Mastery Coach with All-Star Dental Academy. By aiding in the growth and expansion of All-Star, Shelly’s passion for dentistry allows the company to focus on guiding dentists and their teams towards achieving their vision of a successful dental practice. Because each office has their own definition of “success” Shelly focuses her attention on customized coaching by applying her 21 years in the dental field to each department within the office. In addition, as a John Maxwell Certified Leadership Coach, Shelly enjoys working with doctors and office managers on shifting their approach from a managerial approach to a more effective leadership style.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management and training.
00:11
I’m Shelly Van Epps, VP of Business Growth and Development and a Mastery Coach here with All-Star Dental Academy. And today I wanted to talk with you about the importance of evaluating your accounts receivable and collections. So quite often I’m asked, what is a healthy AR or what is a healthy collections amount?
00:34
And that’s different from office to office for one reason. Some of us are in network and we’re having to write off a portion of what we’re doing. And some of us have the benefit of being able to collect everything that we produce. And so when I’m stepping back and evaluating a practice and the health of their accounts receivable, we’re looking for a combination of their collections and their adjustments to come out to no less than 98% of what they produced.
01:03
So if you’re producing 100,000, we want our adjustments in our collection to equal no less than 98,000. So that seems fairly simple, but then you might wonder, well, what about outstanding insurance? What about patient co-pays that we weren’t expecting? That’s where we need to work on some systems. We need to make sure that there’s not a significant lag in that collection. So you need to be on top of
01:32
your outstanding insurance claims, any of those appeals, any of those narratives that they’re asking for. That needs to be a weekly project that’s ongoing without fault. You’re not going to delay that. You have to stay on top of it, or you’re going to end up one of these days looking at your AR and being way off. So we’re taking a temperature at any given time, looking at your trackers or your numbers and assessing that.
02:01
we’re going to be able to tell you, hey, we need to take a look at how we’re doing our estimates and what we’re asking our patients to pay at time of service. It looks like your collection rate is dropping. It’s not the insurance, we’ve looked at that. It is in fact our ability to estimate the copays and or follow through on collections. So start with taking a look at that number
02:28
If you have questions about that, talk with your coach, make sure that that’s a communication that you’re having ongoing, and essentially make sure that what you’re doing, you’re collecting. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at AllStarDentalAcademy.com.
